There have been a lot of stories lately (and even a movie) about people in love with inanimate objects. Today, Sega Toys annoyingly announced that it was jumping on this sad trend by creating a doll-sized robot girlfriend, called Eternal Maiden Actualization, for lonely men. While some people who fall in love with inanimate objects call their orientation objectùm-sexuality, it seems to me that such people fall into a larger class of us called "people who are so scared to get hurt that they subconsciously choose relationships in which they won't be." You know, inanimate objects, emotionally unavailable men, we're all just looking to minimize the pain we know is coming.

Sure, everyone gets involved with an emotionally unavailable guy once. They can be so charming! You know there's more to him! He'll realize that you're special! And so you putter around him, a perpetual motion machine of awesomeness in which you minimize your flaws and maximize your coolness factor, acting loving but aloof enough not to scare him at the same time, after which he inevitably fucks someone else or you get hurt by his actual aloofness or worn down by pretending to be some perfect version of yourself to convince him get emotionally invested. Then you learn not to do it again and go find someone that thinks it's funny or even endearing that you talk too loudly when you drink or sing really bad karaoke or have a weird bellybutton and hopefully you open up and let him get to know that person you are when you're not trying so hard to be liked.

On the other hand, some of us keep doing it. Your life becomes an endless string of dudes that don't allow you to get too close or bail before you can get too invested or force your hand into bailing because you're just not going to take that shit from some guy. And you get to feel the butterflies, and you get to know you can still feel by being in just enough pain when it ends that you notice and maybe it will wring some tears out of you, but, really, when he's not letting you get that close, you're actually not that close. Since you can't get close to him, since you're spending your time trying to be so cool or not being upset about the aloofness and the lack of emotional intimacy, you're not letting him in anymore than he's letting you in.

So, yeah, it's weird that some dudes would rather have an expensive doll than try to have a relationship with a person, or that a woman would love the Berlin Wall and not an actual man, but it's no weirder than convincing yourself that you're in love with some dude you don't really know and who doesn't know you. It's all just one of a myriad number of ways to protect your most fragile bits because if someone doesn't know you, then it isn't gonna hurt that bad when they don't love you back.